O.C. Deputy Felt ‘Cocky’ During Fatal Exercise : Investigation: D.A. releases officer’s narrative of events surrounding his shooting of colleague.

Brian P. Scanlan knew he had to work on keeping his finger off the trigger of his service weapon. He’d learned that a few months earlier at the so-called “laser village” at the Sheriff’s Department’s training academy, where he’d mistakenly shot two people in video exercises--”two people that didn’t need to go,” he remembered later.

Even so, the Orange County sheriff’s deputy acknowledged in an interview released Wednesday that he was feeling “cocky” as he prepared to run through a car-stop exercise behind a Lake Forest movie theater on a quiet Christmas Day that would end in one of the most controversial police shootings in Orange County history.

He and fellow Deputy Darryn Leroy Robins were developing ways to counteract new techniques that Los Angeles gang members had been using to get the drop on cops. Scanlan--a sheriff’s field training officer--figured that if the gang-bangers were up to new tricks, “I want to know.”

Robins, playing the role of a suspect in a car stop, was going to show him something new.

Slowly, the nine-year veteran approached Robins’ car with his loaded 9-millimeter handgun drawn. Robins started talking back to him, demanding to know why he was stopped. Robins’ hands were jittery, “going all over the place,” as he handed over a white piece of paper marked “CDL,” meant to represent a driver’s license, Scanlan recounted.

Then, supposedly responding to a request for his vehicle registration papers, Robins reached up behind the driver’s side sun visor and produced an unloaded .25-caliber handgun, thrusting it out the window, Scanlan said.

Startled, Scanlan “jerked back,” he said, and fired a single Talon bullet into his colleague’s face. Half an hour later, Robins was dead.

Scanlan’s gripping yet strikingly unemotional narrative of what took place behind the Lake Forest movie theater forms the keystone of two months’ worth of interviews, forensic reports, videotapes, photographs and other evidence released to the media Wednesday by the district attorney’s office. The release came a week after the Orange County Grand Jury decided to disregard prosecutors’ recommendations and not indict Scanlan.

The volatile shooting case has garnered considerable media attention, fueled in part by charges from black and Latino groups that the case was not handled properly by authorities because the dead deputy was black and the one who shot him was white.

Yet despite heightened racial sensitivities, many details of the case remained the subject of speculation and off-the-record sources--until Wednesday.

Assistant Dist. Atty. John Conley said prosecutors took the unusual step of releasing almost everything in their investigative files in hopes of dispelling lingering suspicions that the shooting may not have been accidental--or that Robins’ race was somehow a factor in the case.

Prosecutors refused, however, to allow copying or television broadcasting of any of the key videotapes in the case. And even as they allowed reporters to view the tapes in a crowded Santa Ana office, they edited out certain key scenes--such as that showing Robins’ fellow deputies frantically carrying him from a patrol car into the emergency room.

“We decided it was kind of shocking and we didn’t want the family to be upset by showing it to people,” Conley said.

Nonetheless, the newly released evidence provides for the first time a detailed chronology of the day’s events. And it is Scanlan’s 90-minute account, given to investigators just hours after the shooting, that authorities say has become the most authoritative version.

In more than 40 interviews done after the shooting, “nobody’s contradicted anything” that Scanlan related, Conley said. “All the other little details fit.”

Some six hours after the shooting, Scanlan agreed to speak about the incident with investigators from the district attorney’s office and the Sheriff’s Department. He wore light blue doctor’s garb, given to him at the hospital after his blood-stained uniform was seized as evidence, and he spoke in calm, flat tones with the investigators for 90 minutes.

“Why don’t you have a seat right here,” district attorney’s Investigator Mike Major said to Scanlan at the outset. “Long as there’s no spotlight,” Scanlan quipped.

He showed little agitation as investigators pressed for details on the shooting, and his voice broke with emotion only twice: once as he described struggling to get the bleeding Robins into a patrol car and en route to the hospital; and again when he recounted having to tell his newlywed wife that he was in fact the shooter. His wife, who also works at the Sheriff’s Department, had heard in the immediate aftermath of the incident that Robins had shot himself.

“I got to be the one to tell her what had happened,” said Scanlan, near tears.

The day began quietly at the Sheriff’s Department, and the deputies who cover Lake Forest were counting on a slow shift, interviews showed.

Yet from the beginning, there was the reminder of potential violence.

Eric Hendry, a deputy who had been on patrol for one week and was riding with Scanlan to learn the beat, read aloud an FBI report at the morning briefing. The grim subject: “how many officers have been killed,” he told investigators.

The morning went as slowly as expected. But just after 1 p.m., Scanlan and Robins--along with Hendry and Adam Powell, who was riding with Robins--went to assist in a chase of four car-theft suspects who were speeding up the San Diego Freeway near Lake Forest.

The four were stopped and arrested near the Irvine Center Drive exit, and California Highway Patrol officers--who handled the chase--have said in interviews that there was nothing unusual about the stop. Everything, they said, went according to the book.

But the sheriff’s deputies backing them up were clearly bothered.

As Hendry waited at a distance with a shotgun trained on the car, he watched as a CHP officer--without his weapon drawn--approached the suspects.

Scanlan was seething. “What the hell are you doing?” Hendry remembered him shouting at the CHP officers. “This guy’s gonna get killed,” Scanlan remarked.

Unnerved by what he considered a breach of safety procedures, Scanlan organized an impromptu training session at a Kmart parking lot on El Toro Road in Lake Forest. He wanted Robins and Powell to help, so he called them on the police radio.

“I told them to meet me at the Kmart parking lot, that we were going to do a scenario on a felony car stop, so I can show my partner,” Scanlan told investigators.

The session--videotaped from the patrol car camera beginning at 1:37 p.m. and played Wednesday--went smoothly, as the veteran deputies demonstrated how to pull over suspected felons.

Scanlan played the cop, Robins the suspected felon. It was a typical role for Robins, Hendry said. He “always liked to be a bad guy.”

No guns were pointed--just Scanlan’s finger.

The air was relaxed for the session, and one of the closing scenes on the training tape shows Robins waving into Scanlan’s patrol vehicle and laughing before walking out of view.

A few moments later, Robins got a call about a possible burglary at Fuddrucker’s Restaurant, just down the street from Kmart.

Backing up Robins, Scanlan and Hendry went into the building with guns drawn.

“Brian (Scanlan) specifically told me, ‘Keep your finger on the trigger guard,’ ” Hendry recounted. It turned out to be a false alarm, but the point was made, Hendry said. “He always stressed safety in everything we did,” Hendry said.

For that reason, investigators said, the events of the next few minutes proved all the more perplexing.

Robins wanted to run through a training scenario of his own. This one, investigators said, would center on potential threats from Los Angeles gang members wandering south into Orange County.

“I want to show you something I learned in L.A.,” Hendry remembered Robins saying.

The four deputies--Robins, Scanlan, Hendry and Powell--would use the plaza parking lot near Fuddrucker’s as their training ground. Robins drove around the entire lot first to make sure it was clear of people, Hendry said.

Then, Robins told his colleagues, “I don’t want anybody watching, so I can get everybody’s reaction separately,” Hendry said.

He picked Scanlan to run through the drill first while the other two deputies waited in an alley area behind the movie theater at the plaza. “Okay Brian, you’re going to be first. Just pretend I just ran a stop sign and you’re chasing me,” Hendry recalled Robins saying.

Quickly, the two deputies sped off in their patrol cars, Scanlan tailing Robins.

The only witness to what happened next, authorities say, was Scanlan.

Scanlan assumed, he said later, that Robins would likely try to pull a gun on him during the scenario. That much was clear from the way that Robins had set up the whole exercise.

“He said something . . . (about) how cops are getting killed, how they’re doing cops in L.A. Something along those lines. So yeah, I knew that there was going to be a weapon involved,” Scanlan said. “At least I had that premise, like you know, he was going to come after me in some fashion.”

And so, Scanlan said, he began the drill on guard.

Asked how he was feeling when he walked up to the car that he had supposedly just pulled over, Scanlan said: “Cocky. Like I wanted to, I wanted to, I don’t know, I’m not going to say outdraw him or something along those lines. But cocky. I mean, confident. Like you know, ‘Okay, if this is what’s going (on) in L.A., then I want to know. . . .

“I’m the FTO”--the field training officer, he said.

Scanlan said a fellow deputy had just given him a new magazine for his semiautomatic handgun a few days before, and his weapon was loaded as he walked toward Robins’ car.

Sheriff’s Department policy bans the use of a loaded gun during training sessions. But when asked by investigators if he felt comfortable using a loaded gun in a training session, Scanlan said simply: “It felt OK.”

He was asked why he didn’t unload his weapon.

“If I had an answer for that, Darryn would (be) alive,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Scanlan said he never really felt threatened by Robins.

“I felt real comfortable with the fact that I know Darryn’s not gonna do anything to hurt me. I felt real comfortable with that,” he said. “I know he’s done these scenarios before, with other deputies. . . . My intention wasn’t to do anything but just be prepared. Not to fire a round. Not to do anything but just show my position with my weapon. That’s it.”

As Robins fumbled for his driver’s license, the 6-foot-6 Scanlan stood over him with his handgun resting on the roof of the car, out of Robins’ sight. Suddenly, Robins whipped from behind the visor a small handgun and thrust it out the window at him, Scanlan said. He knew Robins carried a second gun, but he said the sight was still jarring.

“When he came out the window, I jerked back,” he said, “It just scared me.”

Then, he fired.

“It happened so fast,” Scanlan said. “It’s a moment that will live for the rest of my life,” he said.

As the wounded Robins crawled toward the passenger door, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t believe that this had actually happened. I said, ‘Darryn, are you OK?’ He went, ‘No.’ Then he looked at me and I grabbed him. And he said: “Hospital.”

Quickly, Scanlan said, he put out an emergency dispatch over the police radio.

Just a few dozen yards away, the call startled Hendry and Powell as they waited behind the theater for their turns to run through the training exercise. Hendry thought he had heard a “pop” a few seconds before, but it wasn’t until he heard Scanlan’s voice on the police dispatch on a “10-33” emergency call, yelling “Get me help here now!” that they knew something was wrong.

As the two sped around the corner to find out what had happened, Powell said all he could see was what looked like two people fighting on the ground.

“I saw Brian at first,” he said. “I thought (it) was involving some type of wrestling match. . . . He was involved with some type of physical altercation with someone trying to getting (sic) him into the back of the car.”

Then he saw Robins, blood “spurting out” of his mouth as he struggled to take a breath. “Brian was saying, ‘He’s been shot, pull him in.’ He was having trouble getting him into the back of the car.”

Hendry said: “I immediately started looking around for suspects.”

Then, he saw Scanlan’s gun on the ground outside the passenger door and picked it up, uncocking it and setting it down on the front seat of Robins’ patrol car.

The next moments were a blur for each of the deputies, but two patrol videos show Scanlan racing through three stop signs on the short ride to Saddleback Memorial Medical Center.

Since the deputies were unable to get Robins’ rigid legs into the car as he lay bleeding across the back seat, they left the back door open, with Robins’ feet sticking out, as Hendry knelt precariously in the front passenger seat and held the back door open.

Within minutes, they made it to the hospital.

While portions of the arrival scene at the hospital were excised from the tapes shown Wednesday, one of the most poignant scenes comes from behind the closed doors of the hospital, as a medical crew takes Robins from the deputies and prepares to bring him into the emergency room.

“Come on, buddy, come on, come on, come on!” Scanlan is heard shouting, the frantic sounds of hospital workers and deputies in the background.

“You’re my buddy, man. Come on, Darryn!”

Hendry said he and Scanlan then joined hands. “We prayed for Darryn, hoping he’d make it,” Hendry recalled.

Less than half an hour later, Robins was pronounced dead.

The Shooting: ‘It Happened So Fast’

Sheriff’s Deputy Brian P. Scanlan’s account of what happened when an impromptu training session ended in the Christmas Day shooting of Deputy Darryn Robins:

1) Scanlan, playing the role of a police officer, removes his loaded 9-millimeter automatic pistol from his holster and holds it just above the roof of Robins’ patrol car, out of the view of Robins, who is playing the role of a suspect stopped by police.

2) Robins reaches up behind the driver’s side sun visor, as if to retrieve the registration papers Scanlan had asked for, but instead produces an unloaded .25-caliber automatic pistol he had placed there, and thrusts it in Scanlan’s direction.

3) Startled by the unexpected weapon, Scanlan steps back and his pistol discharges. Bullet hits Robins in the face, and severs his carotid artery, a wound which proves to be fatal.

Source: Orange County district attorney’s office